Zipcar Buys Fleet Management Startup Local Motion

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Zipcar looks like it is boosting the enterprise side of its car sharing business after it acquiredLocal Motion, a five-year old fleet management startup, in an undisclosed deal.

Local Motion raised $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2013, and it counts the VC firm’s former Microsoft exec Steven Sinofsky among its board members. The company’s premise was to bring many of the processes and efficiencies from the ‘shared economy’ into the enterprise space — for example, helping a company fleet to operate more like… Zipcar.

Zipcar didn’t say why it is buying the company, but it stands to reason that it will look to grow the enterprise-side of its business, and perhaps generally increase efficiencies on its platform, too. Local Motion founders John Stanfield and Clément Gires confirmed that the deal will see their team move over to Zipcar to work on fresh, undisclosed assignments.

“We’re excited to bring what we’ve learned to Zipcar where we’ll be working on a number of projects to drive the future of mobility further and faster,” they wrote in a blog post.

Zipcar was of course itself acquired when rental giant Avis forked out $500 million to buy it in January 2013. Prior to its $6 million round, Local Motion had raised seed funding. It counts Lemnos Labs, Draper and Associates, Morado Venture Partners, VegasTechFund and AME Cloud Ventures among its roster of investors.

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Crunchbase

OverviewZipcar is a membership-based car-sharing company that provides automobile rentals to its members, billable on an hourly or daily basis.
Members are able to view vehicle availability and reserve a self-service car via the internet, iPhone app, or telephone, in increments as short as one hour and pay only for time they reserve. Zipcar vehicles report their positions to a control center using in-car …